What steps can be taken to ensure proper display of UTF-8 characters in PHP output when retrieving data from a MySQL database?

When retrieving data from a MySQL database in PHP, it is important to ensure that UTF-8 characters are properly displayed in the output. To achieve this, you can set the connection character set to UTF-8, specify the content type as UTF-8 in the header, and use the utf8_encode function to convert the retrieved data to UTF-8 encoding. 

// Set connection character set to UTF-8
mysqli_set_charset($connection, "utf8");

// Specify content type as UTF-8 in the header
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Retrieve data from MySQL database
$result = mysqli_query($connection, "SELECT * FROM table");

// Loop through results and encode data to UTF-8
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    echo utf8_encode($row['column_name']);
}

Keywords

UTF-8 PHP MySQL character encoding data retrieval

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